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Decoding VOA Radiogram Program 107

I didn’t have much success decoding VOA Radiogram program 106 last weekend, probably due to changing shortwave propagation conditions as we head closer to summer. According to Kim Andrew Elliott, propagation for last week’s 17860 kHz broadcast was probably the worst since the start of VOA Radiogram in 2013.

I had better luck decoding this weekend’s VOA Radiogram program 107. There were three images and three news items broadcast during this show:

The first two items were transmitted using MFSK32 and the last item (about Yuri Gagarin) was transmitted using MFSK64. That news item was entirely in Russian. Because Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet (which has many more characters than the Latin alphabet) decoding was noticeably slower. Transmitting it using the faster MFSK64 mode helped to offset some of that speed difference.

Results for 17860 kHz

I decoded these images this Saturday at 1600 UTC (Saturday at 12:00 PM EDT) on 17860 kHz:

Reception conditions were good, even with a bit of interference from Radio Exterior de España on 17855 kHz. (Radio Exterior de España is one of the few remaining shortwave stations that actually broadcasts to North America.)

I had 100% text decoding, including the Russian news story. I don’t know any Russian, but I compared the decoded text against the VOA Russian Service story to make sure there were no errors.

Results for 5745 kHz

I decoded these images at 0230 UTC on Sunday (10:30 PM EDT Saturday) on 5745 kHz:

Reception wasn’t quite as good as the earlier broadcast, but I still had 100% text reception.

Results for 15670 kHz

I decoded these images at 1930 UTC on Sunday (3:30 PM EDT Sunday) on 15670 kHz:

The decoding wasn’t quite as clear as the 17860 kHz broadcast, but the image quality was still pretty good. As with the other broadcasts, text decoding was 100%.

Results for The Mighty KBC on 7375 kHz

I decoded this MFSK64 image of tulips from Keukenhof Park that was broadcast by The Mighty KBC at 0130 UTC Saturday (9:30 EDT Saturday) on 7375 kHz during “The Giant Jukebox” program: